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TWENTY-FIVE YEARS 



IN 



OLD WARWICK 



AN ADDRESS 



DELIVERED ON 



Memorial Day, August i8, 1904, 



IN WARWICK, MASS., 



REV. A^° b. MAYO, A. M., LL. D. 



CITY OF WASHINGTON. 

R. BERESFORD, PRINTER, 6l8 F STREET, N. W. 

1905- 



f1^ 



Gift 
Author 

OCT 9 1006 



TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN OLD WARWICK. 



An Address Delivered on Memorial Day, 

August i8, 1904, in Warwick, Mass., by 

Rev. a. D. Mayo, A. M., LL. D. 



Some four years ago I was hoping that my annual visit 
to Warwick might be renewed, but a doubtless good Provi- 
dence was otherwise disposed. Beginning with early au- 
tumn, the remainder of the year, round to the summer, was 
passed in what the doctors made up their minds was a final 
fight for life ; in which the weight of professional opinion was, 
as now and then happens, delivered on the wrong side. For 
while, I suppose, the majority of my non-professional friends 
were waiting for my exit, I, " being still of sound mind," 
reverted to the old days and, quite naturally, to the old 
Warwick habit of "toughing it out" till even a greater age 
than my own. I remembered that my good little mother, 
who never pulled the steelyards at 100 pounds, but went 
through a greater amount of hard work to the square yard 
than any of her sex I recall, stepped out at the age of 89 — 
by accident. Her mother, the "Aunt Beulah" of old War- 
wick, did better still ; as the " accident" that carried her off 
was postponed till 98. Then, great grandmother "Susannah" 
held on till 96. My two grandfathers served this world 
bravely and well till the respective ages of 83 and 85 ; one 
of them, at his death, having served his country as post- 
master for more than fifty years. The crown of this human 
structure was my great grandfather, the longest lived of a 
family of venerable brethren, who, at 96, sold his farm in the 
valley of the Connecticut and moved "West," then St. Law- 
rence Co., New York, to "grow up with the country," and 



grew until, at lOo, he voted for grandfather Harrison as 
President ; and died at loi of a cold caught in walking at 
the head of a procession to celebrate the new President's 
inauguration. Had he not taken that cold he might have 
been one of President Ben. Harrison's postmasters, forty 
years later. 

Then my memory served me with some of the facts in the 
history of Warwick ; that in 1854, with a population of 1,000, 
there were fifty-nine people in the old town over 70 years of 
age ; eleven above 80 and two past 90. Later, in 1872, when 
the population of the town had shrunk to 800, there were 
four over 90, fifteen past 80 and twenty-seven beyond 70. 
Then I further remembered that Dr. Holland, in his "His- 
tory of Western Massachusetts," reports that Warwick, with 
one of the roughest winter climates in the State, was cele- 
brated above all other of its 350 towns for its number of 
extremely old people. By that time you may " guess" that, 
in the language of the prayer-book, I was " both afraid and 
ashamed" to " go back" on my own forebears and the dear 
old town. So I " braced up" and — here I am ; and I advise 
all you, boys and girls, to select as long-lived a generation 
as my own ; so that when not only " heart and flesh fail," 
but doctors agree to your dismissal, you may fall back on 
your native highlands and continue until Providence, in 
whose hands we all abide forever, invites you to migrate 
and " grow up with the country" in some future kingdom 
of Heaven. 

But now that I am once more here, let me thank you for 
the kindness with which you have remembered the sick 
young man that, at the age of 23, away back in the 40's, 
finally left his Warwick home for the life that has carried 
him through every portion of our own country save the 
Pacific Coast and the new colonial possessions half round 
the world. And never has a week passed in that more 
than half century that the life of my childhood, youth and 
early manhood has not enveloped me, as in a far-off world 



of delightful recollections ; never more vivid and enchant- 
ing than when, a month ago, I made up my mind that not 
only pleasure but duty called me back to your yearly 
festival. 

Any stranger can easily learn a good deal of that period 
of which I speak today, from 1823 to 1848, when Warwick 
was certainly at its best estate, according to the time-hon- 
ored idea of a successful New England town. There were 
then 1 150 people ; the majority of the leading families direct 
descendants of the settlers, chiefly from what is now " the 
Greater Boston," who, eighty years before, laid out a road 
from Roxbury 75 miles into the Wilderness of "Gardner's 
Roxbury Canada ;" fifteen years later rechristened Warwick ; 
as good " Squire Blake" fancies, " in memory of the famous 
Guy, Earl of Warwick," in the old home across the sea. 
Probably at no time was the land so productive or well 
tilled as then. The furore for shaving the town clean of it's 
grand old forests of beach, chestnut and pine was then only 
apparent in the fifteen saw mills that " turned out" for the 
neighboring towns a million feet of lumber every year. 
The people still all gathered on Sunday in the old meeting 
house upon the common, although " other denominations" 
were not taxed for the support of any save their own public 
worship. The ten district schools were in full blast. In short ; 
the twenty-five years in old Warwick, of which I speak, 
cover the period when the town was one of the best illustra- 
tions of country life in the New England of seventy years ago. 
How it looked from the windows of the parson's house is 
told in the two charming volumes of Mrs. Fayette Smith, 
familiar to you. But it is the blessedness of our human lot 
that every living man and woman becomes a poet and an 
artist with the retreating years from childhood. Each of 
the two or three hundred " children and youth" that came 
up with myself, if spared long enough, had a separate pic- 
ture of life in old Warwick, beautiful in spite of whatever 
hardships, toils or trials may have been the environment. 



6 

But I am not here today to inflict upon you my own 
picture of the first third of my life in old Warwick, begin- 
ning in 1823, when the incorporated town was about sixty 
years old. I propose to attempt a more useful and, I hope, 
interesting theme — to try to ascertain from my own expe- 
rience and observation what were the elements of society 
and the circumstances that made what we fondly call " old 
Warwick" one of the model towns of New England, and what 
made the New England town of seventy years ago, accord- 
ing to the historians, the most notable universitv for the 
citizenship of a world's republic in ancient or modern days. 
And then, with full recognition of the past and all the pre- 
cious legacies it has bequeathed to us, I would enter my 
protest against the academic pessimism that, through speech 
and sons: and storv and editorial comment, bewails the 
present breaking up of that order of affairs ; with blatant 
prediction of a hundred varieties of local, municipal, State 
and national ruin in the nearby future. A distinguished 
Doctor of Divinity in the flourishing new city of Atlanta, 
Ga., on learning that I hailed from Boston, replied : " Well, 
I suppose your old town is about done growing." Another 
statesman, now out of politics, addressed 3,000 people in 
Tremont Temple on " The Financial Decay of Massachu- 
setts." The trouble with the learned doctor was that he 
thought, because his own city was growing, every town a 
hundred years old must be on the decline. The statesman's 
difficulty, as I found afterwards, was his own inability to 
pay his debts at home. The same delusion appeared, as I 
remember, in a meeting of " us boys," held on the hay- 
mow of my grandfather's barn, to decide on the celebration 
of Independence Day, by a ball. The " society leader" 
among us was stricken with an unaccountable indifference, 
which, after a good deal of pumping, came out in the de- 
spairing tone : "Why, all the girls have gone to Boston"; 
whereupon somebody piped up : " It's only your girl that's 
gone to Boston. Why don't you take the stage and dance 



with her down there?" It is our human misfortune that, 
when our personal heydey is waning, we can hardly believe 
it is sunrise anywhere else. So, if I succeed, I hope to leave 
such of you as lived in or near the old times not in despair 
of the Warwick which is today ; but with a well-founded 
hope of what may be in store for it in the next half cen- 
tury. I shall never forget that, between the ages of ten and 
fifteen, I never went to sleep on the little front seat in the 
" Center School House" at the Lyceum when grand old 
Squire Jonathan Blake put on his glasses and, whether in 
verse or prose, wherever he began, loomed up as the Town 
Prophet. When there were not a hundred miles of railroad 
in Massachusetts he predicted all the glories of the limited 
express from ocean to ocean, with glimpses of other things 
yet undiscovered. Still the summit of his prophecy was 
" not in sight" of the magnificent revelations of even the 
past fifty years. Each of you, boys and girls, now lives 
imder a new heaven, on a new earth, from the reahn in which 
I lived in my first twenty-five years. Each of you is doing or 
reading about and perfectly at home with a dozen things that 
my grandfathers could no more accomplish than work one 
of the miracles of the New Testament. So I, at the close 
of my familiar talk today, would send you home with your 
^' heads swimming" with hope of the possibilities of the 
New Massachusetts, already in sight ; even as we used to 
go home from the Lyceum at the ringing of the nine-o'clock 
bell, after we had one on the new church, to dream of the 
future, determined to launch out and " go where glory 
waited." 

So let me now, as briefly as the importance of the subject 
will warrant, try to set forth some of the elements which 
made for the success of the better order of New England 
towns seventy years ago. I say "the better order"; be- 
cause there were then "mean towns" as well as "mean 
people" in every town ; I fancy, in at least as large propor- 



8 

tion and often with a greater opportunity for mischief 
making than among their descendants of today. 

First, and largely, we must consider the original popula- 
tion of the six miles square, now partly Warwick and 
Orange ; the large majority, however, left in Warwick at 
the division of territory. This population originally con- 
sisted of some sixty proprietors, who by act of the " Great 
and General Court," of ■Massachusetts, in the year 1735, 
made this one of four townships, each of six miles square, 
to be assigned in sixty-three equal shares " one for the first 
settled minister, one for the use of the ministry and one for 
the schools ;" the sixty remaining to be given to the peti- 
tioners and " such as were the descendents of the officers 
and soldiers who served in the expedition to Canada in the 
year 1690." In 1738 a portion of this group appeared and 
were given possession, each of a fifty-acre home-lot. From 
this date until 1763, for twenty-eight years, the settlement 
grew under the name of " Gardner's Roxbury Canada," by 
three separate distributions of land, 'till its incorporation by 
the General Court, by the name of Warwick. The entire 
original territory included nearly 25,000 acres of land, and 
was divided largely according to the quality, the poorer 
the land the larger the farm. Each of the original propri- 
etors was taxed an equivalent of probably $10.00 to defray 
expenses ; and, as the division went on, the tax increased. 
Indeed, it is probable that each of the first sixty proprietors 
was assessed a sum from $30.00 to $50.00, equivalent to a 
much larger sum at present, to encourage the first ten who 
found out " the nearest route from Roxbury" to this new 
tract of country. Ten years later, the bounty was increased 
to ;^20 to each individual, and later to ^30. 

Now here was a principle of selection of good omen for 
the beginning of the settlement. These people, many of 
them descendants of soldiers, were evidently more than a 
fair representative of what is now the Greater Boston, in- 
cluding a good proportion of families honorably distin- 



guished for service at home. They were able to offer what 
was then a generous bounty for real settlers. There was 
no such rush as we now read of at the settlement of a new 
State to pre-empt a quarter-section of Uncle Sam's out- 
door lot. It was known who came. The fact that the 
three first lots were assigned for the church, the ministry 
and the schools, declares the opinion of the settlers in re- 
gard to the corner stone of their little commonwealth in the 
far-off woods. 

The coming War of Independence, some ten years after 
the incorporation of the town, found these people so thor- 
oughly alive to the situation that they even overcame their 
habitual reverence for the clergy, and were only prevented 
from " dismissing, disarming and confining" their first 
minister on suspicion of Toryism, on his pledge, "upon 
honor, not to influence or prejudice the minds of the people 
against the common cause." Their behavior through the 
whole period of the war ; their instructions to the first dele- 
p-ate sent to the Colonial Convention ; their deliberate con- 
sultation at the various steps that led to the organization of 
-the new State; the character of the men they sent to the 
Legislature and elected to the various town and county 
offices ; all speak well of the town. As we go on in the analy- 
sis of society, as I remember it, through the twenty-five 
most prosperous years of the town, we shall meet at every 
step with the assurance that these people who first built the 
road through the boundless forest in sight of Mount Grace, 
then opened the pathway through the woods to their nearest 
neighbors, and for the first fifty years toiled with heart and 
brain and hands to get the new settlement " out of the 
woods" " meant business," and went about their " job" with 
a deliberate wisdom, a courage and a patience that account 
for what I found at my earliest recollection concerning the 
people among whom I was born and to whom I owe the 
best of what I am and have been able to do in life. 

During these more than fifty years of my absence from 



10 

my native town, though no " globe trotter," I have been 
called practically to spend about an equal division of time 
in my own country in each of its continental divisions save 
the Western mountain region and Pacific coast — in New 
England, the old Middle, the original Western and all the 
Southern States, I am confident I have never known a 
population of i,ooo people in one community that contained 
within itself the elements of more valuable service to the 
Republic than the old Warwick of my day. During the past 
seventy-five years it has sent forth perhaps as large a number 
of able men for leadership in the industrial and all the pro- 
fessional departments of American life, with '• noble women 
not a few," as any similar community in any portion of the 
country. My last letter from the late Bishop Frederic Dan 
Huntington, for two terms in his early manhood a Warwick 
schoolmaster, contains a most discriminating, appreciative 
and affectionate remembrance of the leading families of the 
town in that period. As before said, here was a " fair start" 
for Warwick in its first hundred years of life as one of the 
350 and more towns of the Commonwealth of Massachu- 
setts. It does not follow that the mere organization of a 
New England township was responsible for its power and 
influence ; so great that Thomas Jefferson, among the good 
things he couldn't do, seriously proposed to cut up old Vir- 
ginia in imitation of its rival, Massachusetts, into the towns 
that came nearer realizing the original Virginia ideal of 
" State rights" than any southern commonwealth ever 
succeeded in translating that theory to an accomplished 
fact. There were plenty of towns then in Massachusetts 
that did not succeed in this way. Indeed, there were several 
that, in the expressive language of the day, were baptized 
" Hell Town," and required several " revivals of religion" 
to get them in sight of the golden gates. But there has 
yet been found no recipe for making a good town, state or 
nation of a people in that condition of ignorance, supersti- 
tion, shiftlessness, vulgarity and vice known by the dictiou- 



11 

ary name, " Illiteracy." It was because Warwick was from 
the first what it has been all through — a " chosen people ;" 
that we, her children, today feel ourselves honored as we 
recount and recall her "days of old." 

2d. From such an origin, it is not difficult to understand 
how the foundations of the new town were laid in its family 
life. The Puritan folk of New England " had no use" for 
an unmarried man or woman ; and the cruel stigma of " old 
maid" for generations had inflicted a chronic slander on the 
fair name and fame of this class, until Theodore Parker 
came to the rescue, in his triumphant eulogy on " The 
Glorious Old Maids of Massachusetts." The early settlers 
of Warwick probably did not include a large contingent of 
"old bachelors," as the additional persuasive to early mar- 
riage was offered by the gift of a farm to each family. A 
fundamental idea concerning the old-time New England 
family was that marriage was no sentimental arrang-ement 
of the '• oak and ivy" persuasion, but was a manly and 
womanly partnership for life ; first to love God and each 
other, and then, " till death us do part," to " ivork together 
for good." This law of service had no exceptions. Of 
course, there was the usual half-conscious arrangement of a 
mild class distinction in the society of the place ; possibly 
a dozen of the sixty families by common consent being 
" looked up to" and relied on for social and other sorts of 
leadership. But the one thing that has always separated 
vitally any genuine upper class in New England society 
from every historical aristocracy of the old or its modern 
imitation in the new world, was spoken " once for all" in 
Palestine, when the Master said : " Let him who is greatest 
among you be your servant." "On this rock" is builded 
the entire structure of modern Christian, as opposed to 
every form of a selfish paganized, order of society. This 
group of superior families, as I knew them in my youth, 
was represented by perhaps fifty of the hardest-working men 
and women in the community, whose names appear when- 



12 

ever the people are called to elect anybody for any important 
service. Their superiority was not gauged by money ; 
indeed it is doubtful if any man in town in my day was 
" worth 40,000 dollars" — why they didn't make it $50,000 
was one of the puzzles of my boyhood. While com- 
fortable living was the rule, and perhaps a score of the 
houses were larger if not better than others, there was no 
luxurious life. I have no recollection that any Warwick fam- 
ily in the twenty-five years named had a permanent servant. 
Every mother, not an invalid, was her own housekeeper 
and the girls were trained for the same office ; with few 
exceptions a type of housekeeping which has passed into 
history and literature, and, as far as the " pies" are con- 
cerned, deserves commemoration in poetry. A few daugh- 
ters of the poorer families were available for occasional 
^' help ;" always expecting to " sit at the table" with the 
family, especially "when it had company." We had the 
usual dressmaker and the " tailoress," dear jolly "Aunt 
Experience," who carried every man's " measure" in her 
capacious memory, and taught me to fold my first "tailcoat" 
so thoroughly that I always remember her on that occasion. 
Her reign was only disturbed by the irruption of a "gen- 
tleman tailor from Ireland," whose term of service came to 
a sudden end in a street fight with a crowd of the saucy 
boys of the town. The general philanthropic work, now in 
the hands of two or three societies and churches, was con- 
centrated in grand old Aunt Annie, who knew by instinct 
where she was wanted — in her own words, "had nussed in 
every family in town" — and probably died in honorable 
maidenhood because she loved every man in town so dearly 
she couldn't break the hearts of all the rest by marrying 
any one ; and as for the children ! the famous picture of 
Germany, by Kaulbach, a glorious German woman with 
children hanging all about her, was a correct portrait of 
Warwick's good Aunt Annie. 

The New England women for two hundred years from 



13 

Plymouth Rock, as a body the most intelligent, effective 
and every way worthy of their sex then in Christendom, 
were the only body so numerous that with occasional ex- 
ceptions had no servant class in the household. Rough 
labor in the European field and on the old American planta- 
tion changes woman to a beast of burden, in some ways 
stronger and more effective than man. But such work as 
was given to the women of New England for two hundred 
years, accompanied by the upper-story service in the family 
and societv, was too much even for the powerful physical 
constitution brought from England. In my youth the crisis 
came with such a general breakdown of the health of young 
women as might have wrought a social disaster had not a 
good Providence sent us Bridget from the Green Island and 
labor-saving machinery in the home, fifty years of which 
has brought to the native-born New England women the 
marvelous reversion to health and supreme activity we now 
behold. 

A great help to happy marriage was the good old New 
England function of " courting." Courting was a serious 
business, especially to the young woman partner. My 
- father used to tell how on one occasion, having started in 
his best rig on a week-day evening to visit his " Sophronia," 
he was met by his father with the order : " Go home, boy. 
None of that till Sunday night." So, after the best girl 
had spent the busiest kind of a Sunday morning and after- 
noon at church service, probably singing in the choir, with 
five-o'clock singing school, including the Sunday dinner, 
and then had faced her destiny by " sitting up" with her 
admirer from " early candle lighting" to the small hours, 
leaving only a brief hour for sleeping before up at daylight 
to wrestle the terrors of Monday washing day, and had 
" stuck to that" for one, possibly two or three years, if she 
didn't know her man she had only herself to blame. I have 
no recollection of a divorce, and not half a dozen family 
separations, and those only for extreme cause, with hardly 



14 

a sexual scandal, in the twenty-five years of my residence 
in Warwick. There were notable cases of a good woman who 
held on to a drunken husband year by year, until she 
finally pulled him into the church, where he died, certainly 
free from the odor of New England rum, if without " the 
odor of sanctity." And out of several of these families came 
a set of boys, sent forth by their brave mothers to earn dis- 
tinction. 

While doubtless all these people, save a few store and 
tavern loungers, did work too hard, yet that tireless in- 
dustry and careful economy of two hundred years was the 
foundation of the industrial superiority of New England 
today, which will endure as long as the corner-stone on 
which it was builded is not broken. But here the economy 
of New England meant saving on the lozver side to invest in 
the upper side of life. The money saved, often by bodily 
hardship, was used to build the church and the school, send 
the boy to college, always invested at the top of life, verify- 
ing the divine precept : "All things shall be added unto" a 
man or state that " first seeks the kingdom of God and His 
righteousness." My own first twenty-five dollars that sent 
me to college at twenty was obtained by the present of an 
empty powder flask or can by my father, with a hole in the 
top, through which anything from a cent to a ninepence 
could be dropped, but out of which nothing could be rescued 
until it was filled. 

Of course, in every form of society as intense as that de- 
scribed a good deal must be allowed for an omnipotent, 
omnicient and omnipresent social public opinion, which 
made every man, woman and child a sort of detective police 
in regard to everybody's business. The " after clap" of this 
was seen when the boys began to leave us for Boston, Cin- 
cinnati and New Orleans, seventy years ago the three 
lighthouses that shot their rays from afar to allure every 
ambitious youth. Then, of course, came the usual break- 
ing loose of the boy who could do only one disreputable 



15 

thing at home, " get drunk." And there were enough 
domestic tragedies of good girls, carried off their feet to 
marry worthless young men from the cities, to set up two 
or three successors to the late Miss Mary E. Wilkins. Still, 
the morale of the town followed the large majority who 
went forth to make a record of which any community might 
well be proud. Some of you, bright school boys or girls, 
could do no better than look up the names of the young 
folk who for the last seventy years have left Warwick to 
become worthy and often distinguished citizens of the Re- 
public in almost every honorable position in life. 

The industry of the New England women and children 
of that day was something marvelous. With their butter 
and cheese, their weaving and spinning, with the new in- 
dustry of braiding palm-leaf hats, for nearly a generation 
they really were the " better half " in the support of the 
family. The trade in the stores was almost exclusively 
" barter" in the few articles of home consumption, leav- 
ing the productions of the farm and forest to be utilized for 
building up the permanent investment of the family. 

During the ten years that I kept my father's store accounts 
I have no recollection of any woman making a " bad debt." 
They were " hard customers" to sell goods to, because they 
knew the pay for them would come out of their own flesh 
and blood. There was the usual number of " men folks" 
who would " run up a debt" to the straining point, which 
they probably never intended to pay. The popular talk of 
the decline of honesty in business in New England received 
its first protest, with a good many other humbugs, from 
Theodore Parker, when he declared that the Boston of his 
day, so far as business went, in honesty was far beyond any 
previous time. Seventy years ago, everywhere in the United 
States, business meant " Every man for himself and the 
devil take the hindmost." The great revelations of breach 
of trust, turning corporation screws, and, most dangerous of 
all, denying the natural right to work for a living to whole 



16 

classes of men, are simply the logical results of that old 
style of trading, beginning with the boys swapping jack- 
knives, and permeating society from ridge-pole to cellar. 
Ninety per cent, of the men worth $100,000 in New Eng- 
land today began their lives as all but half a dozen boys 
began in Warwick, and in every country store or trading 
place every " trick of trade" was practiced by these young 
men in the getting of their fortunes. So in these latter 
days this habit has blossomed out into the gigantic tyrannies 
of labor and capital, to the horror of the whole noble army 
of pessimists. The way out of all this is an organization of 
industry, which, in due time, will come in sight of the other 
searchlight of the gospel : " Whatsoever ye would that men 
should do to you, do ye even so to them." 

The shadow side of that old family life was, first, its ter- 
rible intensity ; second, its ignorance of sanitary law, which 
located family diseases that carried off one member after 
another with the regularity of the executioner's call in the 
Reign of Terror in Paris, and almost every autumn after 
the short summer's overwork would plunge the whole com- 
munity into epidemics that now seem to have abandoned 
the North and retreated to the South, as I have observed 
for the last twenty years. There was also a great lack of 
wholesome amusement. E^•en the liberalized religion of 
the new Congregationalism held the young people with too 
" taut a rein." The strain was relieved at one end by the 
almost universal habit of drink and the terrible ravages of 
drunkenness, until the great temperance movement came in 
that we still have with us. For the girls, who, with rare 
exceptions, " let rum alone," the favorite outlet w^as the 
half-yearly dance, the occasional excursion or sleigh ride, 
the delightful berry-picking and the mild flavor of the 
" forfeit party," where universal osculation seemed to rob 
that indulgence of all its perils. 

3d. When we come to talk of society we can do little 
but repeat what has already been said of life in the family ; 



17 

for society in its modern city significance conld hardly be 
said to exist in old Warwick. One half the year was 
given to "getting a living" ont of the stubborn hills and 
narrow valleys. As an old fellow from the White Mount- 
ains expressed it : " This is a country where you have 
three months to raise things, three months to get 'em under 
kiver, and six months to eat 'em up. I'm going to take 
my boys out West." The long winter, really beginning at 
Thanksgiving and " hanging on" till a bleak Mayday, apart 
from the usual work of caring for the cattle and keeping 
up the woodpile, left leisure for something so much better 
than society as now understood that we deplore the loss of 
the good old habits of " going a visiting," tea drinking, and 
the evening neighborhood gathering which left scarcely a 
house in any permanent loneliness — lighting up the whole 
community, as 3'ou sometimes see from the car windows 
passing through a wilderness country, a running fire chang- 
ing a bleak mountain side to a sort of fairyland. 

The soul of New England society in that day was the 
everlasting habit of talk. A people so intelligent, intense 
and bent on doing things in such a community had every- 
thing to talk about. They leaned over the rail fences and 
talked to each other in the fields. The women talked at 
their housework, and the clatter of tongues kept time to 
the rocking of the cradle and the braiding of hats. The 
village store and the shoemaker's shop were, each in its way, 
a free university. The meeting-house between the two 
Sunday services was vocal with the gossip of the women ; 
while the men talked louder, with coarser gossip on the 
tavern porch and in the postoffice. Nothing was done 
until it was "talked into shape." So far from avoiding 
" talking shop," the people did nothing else — their own 
life, the conditions of public affairs in town, State and na- 
tion ; every man's business; the minister's sermon ; " sizing 
up" the new school mistress ; especially the last engage- 
ment as announced by the publication at the church by the 



18 

minister or posted up in the notice box. Here was society 
in its essence; the exchange of opinions by people dead in 
earnest, engaged in the making of a new Republic that be- 
fore another half century would astonish the world by the 
greatest revolution of modern times, leaving the Nation a 
new world's power, the object lesson of a people's nation 
to Christendom. 

4th. Along with these three foundation stones of the 
new town in the wilderness was another most important 
additional " corner stone"; the Church and the Christian 
Ministry, as originally established in the year of the incor- 
poration of the town, nearly thirty years after its first settle- 
ment, and as it had continiied for some eighty years until 
the time of my own final departure from Warwick in 1848. 
At that time the people had nominally been living under a 
" Christian ministry," covering a term of nearly eighty 
years. 

As early as 1754 the little colony, while the company 
was paying 30 pounds bounty for settlers, voted to build a 
meeting house " 35 feet long, 30 wide, with 19 feet posts," at 
an expense of 26 pounds 13 shillings 4 pence for the builder, 
the workmen paid four shillings a day. But, not being a 
log house, it was two years before it came to the " raising," 
probably the great occasion of the year, accomplished by 
calling in extra " hands" from Northfield and the adjacent 
settlements. The Indians were meanwhile engaged in their 
favorite occupation of " killing and capturing divers per- 
sons," and ^8 was voted to build a fort for protection 
against this detachment of Satan's forces in those parts, 
re-enforced by the wolves and wild cats, on whose heads a 
heavy price was set. The meeting house went on with the 
saw mill and the grist mill. In 1760 the first money was 
raised by the settlement to defray the expense of "some 
suitable orthodox minister's preaching," and the same year 
^149 was voted for the settlement and salary of the Rev. 
Lemuel Hedge ; ^60 for salary and £(^ for expense of " or- 



19 

dination," which probably was not under the auspices of 
the " W. C T. U." The minister's salary was voted for five 
years, and afterwards arranged on a sliding scale, to rise as 
the families increased, thirteen shillings and four pence for 
each family. One hundred families would give a salary of 
;^8o and " 30 cords of wood, cut 8 feet long." The old com- 
mon, a tract of ten acres, was selected for the meeting- 
house site, and one hundred acres voted as a settlement to 
the minister near the present village. Mr. Hedge accepted 
the terms of settlement, and in March, 1761, the proprietors 
of the town met in the new building, the congregation con- 
sisting of the original 2)1 families. The meeting-house was 
also the only Town Hall. A burying ground was added 
in 1766. 

The breaking out of the War of Independence, ten years 
later, involved the people in difficulty with their minister, 
who was accused of Toryism, and was only saved from 
being "dismissed, disarmed and confined" by his promise 
"on his honor" not to "meddle with politics." A few 
years later the people voted to excuse the Baptists from 
taxation for the support of the Congregational minister, and 
instructed their first delegate to the General Assembly of 
the colony to advocate " toleration of all persons on the 
subject of religion without giving one the advantage of the 
other." The war period was further disturbed by a religious 
excitement, terminating in the only religious scandal that 
ever affected the town. Parson Hedge died during the con- 
tinuance of the war, in 1777, the day that General Bur- 
goyne surrendered in far-off Saratoga, New York, after a 
ministry of seventeen years. 

The people made haste to supply themselves with another 
spiritual leader in the person of Rev. Samuel Reed. He was 
ordained in 1779, and in 1794 became also minister of the 
town. Mr. Reed died in 181 2, after a ministry of thirty- 
three years. There were various legends in circulation dur- 
ing my boyhood bearing upon the physical prowess of this 



20 

excellent man, ag^ainst whose spiritual outfit there seems to 
have been no protest. But the good man was no worse 
fitted for the work of the Lord in old Warwick on that 
account. 

In 1814 the Rev. Preserved Smith, son, father, grandfather 
and probably great grandfather of several well "preserved" 
generations, was ordained as Mr. Reed's successor, and re- 
mained in the position until within two years of my own 
departure from town in 1848, through a most useful, intel- 
ligent and liberal Christian ministry of more than thirty 
years. During Mr. Reed's ministry the second meeting- 
house was built, which, to my youthful eyes, was a miracle 
of ecclesiastical architecture ; especially on its first lighting 
up for a Christmas service, not religious, but a lecture on 
Peace — a dozen tallow candles in each of what seemed to 
me its countless windows and a small forest of such green 
things as could be obtained or imitated within. It was built 
in 1786 to accommodate the entire population, with forty 
pews on the ground floor, galleries around three sides with 
pews above and behind them. One of these big, square pews 
was appropriated by three of " us boys," in the northwest 
corner, from which we could look down upon the minister's 
head, or across into the faces of the two town divinities who 
sang " treble and counter" in the choir, or do anything ex- 
cept make enough noise to be " called to order" by the 
parson. A huge "sounding-board" hung suspended over 
the minister's head in his tall pulpit, with its two rows of 
seats in the front, where the deacons and the town authori- 
ties sat facing the congregation. It was not until I was old 
enough to carry my mother's " foot stove" to church that 
the people finally consented to warm the inside. In my 
early youth this was the only church in town, although 
there were already two or three organizations of Dissenters, 
only about half the people then belonging to the Congre- 
gational Church, which in creed had become Unitarian in 
faith, though with no change in organization or polity. The 



21 

result of the final disruption of the original church into four 
" societies," each attempting to support public worship, with 
a steadily declining population, is well known to all of you. 

The noble army of critics who still picture the people of 
the New England of that day as the slaves of a narrow 
religious creed, living under the tyranny of a minister, a more 
complete pope than the venerable head of the Catholic 
Church at present, in the vernacular language " get the 
cart before the horse." The difference between all the 
European and the American churches a century ago was 
that, over there, the church united with the state made the 
organized religion for the people, whereas, here the people 
made the church. Even in the strict days of the Puritan 
regime, which only lasted until the accession of William 
and Mary to the throne closed the era of religious persecu- 
tion in England, the people made the church, chose their 
own minister, and put him in the pulpit " during good be- 
havior." But at the beginning of the 19th century the 
occasional clerical heresies in the Congregational Church 
culminated in the group of ministers which, under the 
leadership of Channing was finally separated into what 
was loosely called the Unitarian, but was really a body of 
the leading churches of Massachusetts, conducted according 
to the original Congregational idea of the absolute independ- 
ence of every church, tempered by the liberty of " advising," 
and in extreme cases leaving a congregation to " work 
out its own salvation." For more than twenty years of my 
youth the original church, with perhaps a dozen of the same 
sort in Central and Western Massachusetts, was one of these, 
and for thirty years a whole generation of the people had 
been educated and led by a scholarly, wise and devoted 
ministry away from controversy. 

The New England congregational polity was the only 
original American form of church organization, all the 
others being adaptations of the different European churches. 
In the four or five different religious bodies that accepted it 



90 



are gathered today possibly from five to ten thousand con- 
gregations. It is the only polity under which the church 
can adjust its creeds and organization to the advancing 
Christian civilization of the years without violent agitation, 
trials for heresy and painful disruptions. When a working 
majority of a congregation believes in " expansion" it 
simply calls a minister to represent its faith. At the period 
named, certainly for fifteen of the twenty-five years, this 
organization consisted of what was called "church and con- 
gregation," the congregation practically the final authority. 
The large majority of the people were faithful church- 
goers. They came on Sunday in their own " teams," "put 
them up" in the two great rows of horse sheds near by, and 
made a day of it for the morning and afternoon service, 
with an intermission of an hour occupied by the Sunday 
school, in which the minister still preached to a class of 
" grown people" in the basement story, while the majority of 
women visited above stairs and the men talked on the piazza 
of the hotel or in grandfather's post office. It was all through 
by three o'clock P. M. and the people went home to their Sun- 
day dinner. Th? singing was by a volunteer choir, which 
in my day was well described by Peter Parley's charming 
story, "A Village Choir." The singers met at five P. M. for 
a Sunday evening singing school. Every winter good old 
James Ford, from Rowe, appeared, with a voice like the 
sound of the North wind, to " keep singing school." That 
was all there was of church services. The old-time prayer 
meeting had been given up, the children were no longer 
catechised, and the minister, still " settled for life," was left 
to the liberty of becoming what he really was; the "first 
citizen, the man of all work," educational, spiritual, philan- 
thropic, the constant visitor, adviser and helper of his peo- 
ple, " starting" the boys in their Latin, himself a good 
scholar and one of the best schoolmen in the region, send- 
ing forth a family that made its mark in several States. It 
may be my delusion of " looking backward," but I cannot 



23 

conceive a more enviable position for any competent man, 
gifted with the spiritual tact and knowledge of human na- 
ture that is half of religion, wisely facing the sunrise, than 
was occupied at that day by the first generation of liberal 
Congregational clergymen in Massachusetts. They did not 
build up a great denomination and did not want to. But 
their writings and their preaching inaugurated a movement 
that is now mightily at work, from the Catholic to the 
Christian Science sect, and which in some blessed day 
perhaps may once more give us a Christian people mar- 
shaled in one grand army of the Lord for a final campaign 
against' the lower side of x^merican society to establish that 
kingdom of God which is not a church, but a civilization, 
founded on the sermon on the mount, the beatitudes, the 
Lord's prayer and the law of love to God and man. 

5th. Next in importance as one of the vital elements of 
the old-time New England life was the school. Warwick 
was not one of the towns favored by an academy, and only 
occasionally with a private school, although the minister 
and the new doctor were always ready to help out an ambi- 
tious boy or girl in their studies and give advice in good 
reading. The town was divided into ten school districts, 
and as the entire school population, including the big boys 
in winter, was scarcely more than two hundred, several of 
these schools were very small, although in my day each was 
favored by a " master." In the autumn what was called " a 
fall school," a private tuition arrangement, was usually kept 
up, in which high-school studies were introduced, generally 
taught by a college graduate. 

But the New England common school of that period was 
simply the center of a group of agencies backed by a public 
opinion and habit which really made each of the 350 Massa- 
chusetts towns of seventy years ago one of the best possible 
universities for the training of a Republican citizenship, 
within a short generation to be tested in thegreat Civil War 
for the preservation of the Union. 



24 

One of the origiial conditions of the settlement of the six 
miles square of mountain wilderness that became Warwick 
was a provision that one of the sixty-three equal shares of 
land should be reserved for the support of schools. Imme- 
diately after the town had supplied itself with the regula- 
tion three " necessaries of life," spiritual and material, a 
meeting-house, a saw mill and a grist mill, it made haste to 
vote ^lo for the support of a school. During the more 
than twenty years previous the children were doubtless in- 
structed at home or by the minister. The American com- 
mon school, established by law in the Massachusetts colony 
in 1647, declared by Horace Mann "the most import- 
ant new departure in human affairs since the founding of 
Christianity," was the first permanent attempt of the whole 
people to educate all the children by public taxation through 
the ordinary local, municipal and State agencies of a free 
government. The colonists of Massachusetts, as a body, 
were more competent to school their own children than 
probably any previous settlement representing all orders of 
society. But it was soon found that the school required a 
separate organization, and by the time Warwick became a 
town the district system of schooling had become common 
through all the settled parts of New England save in Rhode 
Island. In Warwick the school began in 1768, from the 
first co-educational, the earliest kept by a woman, notwith- 
standing the provision that the winter term should be under 
a master. But it was provided that " if the major part of 
the quarter where she lived objected against her keeping 
school the town should dismiss her." She received four 
and sixpence a week for teaching, her father " throwing in" 
the board. The appropriations for schools increased in ten 
years to twice that sum, and in 1785 the town was divided 
into the ten school districts that remained during the twen- 
ty-five years of my own W^arwick life. 

I was employed to teach in three of these districts, one 
the "center", the school term lasting two and three months. 



25 



at wages of twelve, fifteen and twenty dollars a month, out 
winter "boarding round" and on the last living at home. 
My mother had been a school mistress and both my sisters 
*' followed suit." Indeed it was the " eminently respectable" 
thing for every competent young person to "keep school." 
The'^late Bishop F. D. Huntington, on graduating and as 
a divinity student, was twice the master of our "fall 
school." He insisted that every boy in his upper class 
should teach during the coming winter. We all succeeded in 
getting employment except one, who, after long waiting, was 
hired; although he reported that he "differed a good deal 
from 'the committee when examined in arithmetic and 
grammar." Horace Mann said "up to our time almost 
every distinguished public man m New England has been 
a school master;" and Daniel Webster said, " If I had as 
many boys as old King Priam, I would send them all to the 
country district school." 

As usual, the critics of that period make the same blunder 
in their estimate of the old-time country district school as 
in their talk about the church of the New England of seventy 
years ago. Of course, tried by the strict laws of the organ- 
ization, methods of study and discipline and sanitary ar- 
rangements of the " New Education," the old schools were 
" mOTe or less"— sometimes a good deal " more"— defective. 
But their one superiority in which they surpassed the pres- 
ent system was that they were essentially a vital part of the 
people. The whole town of Warwick " kept school," at 
least six months in the year through the country district 
school, and during the remaining six months "took mat- 
ters into its own hands." Mr. Emerson wrote to his daugh- 
ter at a boarding school : " Find out the best teacher and 
study what he teaches." During my youth, m two im- 
portant towns where I officiated as schoolmaster, the schools 
were taught in winter by young men who, with scarcely an 
exception, afterward became noted and often distinguished, 
in several cases of national reputation. They were often 



26 

college students, and generally the boys engaged in what 
was then often a peril to life and health, " getting an educa- 
tion." The summer schools were " kept" by the daughters 
of the ministers, the doctors and the leading families, who 
afterwards became the foremost women in their communi- 
ties. Each of these was a " bright and shining light" to 
the little group of children and youth, encouraging and 
often helping in private the more ambitious, and even wak- 
ing up the dunces and arresting the mischief makers. The 
coming to a town of a thousand people, practically isolated 
from the world in winter, of half a dozen young men of this 
sort was a Godsend, They were taken on trust into the 
best society, and not unfrequently found that winter their 
" better half " for life. 

In addition to this, in my own town, in two or three pub- 
lic and as many private libraries, there were probably 500 
books accessible to every boy and girl, like " Harper's 
Family Library," "Sparks' American Biography," the 
novels of Miss Sedgwick, Cooper, Scott, and, unhappily, 
the ghost novels, " The Three Spaniards," "Alonzo 
and Melissa," and " The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey," 
which, as I now read their names, send the cold shivers 
down my spine. Later came the first copy of Shakspeare, 
which our champion young woman, who braided hats before 
a book-rack, read through in a week, saying : " They are 
the prettiest stories I ever read." After several unexpected 
fights among the boys, fired up by the battles of the drama- 
tist, an eminently respectable old gentleman volunteered 
the statement : " This Shakspeare makes our boys sassy, 
and we must put him down." I am old-fashioned enough 
to believe that the reading I did there before, at the age of 
seventeen, I ever saw a large library, perhaps covering two 
or three hundred volumes, was better than that of the city 
school boy of today, who faces a million volumes and a regi- 
ment of advisers concerning what not to read, too often 



27 

compromising on the sensational newspapers, magazines ana 
picture papers illustrated by reading. 

Then the winter lyceum, which met in the Center school 
house every week, where the women brought their knitting 
work and the best men in town wrestled mightily in debate 
over questions like "Temperance," "Capital Punishment," 
"Education," " Nullification," " The Annexation of Texas," 
indeed, everything that could interest the boundless curi- 
osity of such a people ; the debate, prefaced often by a half- 
hour free lecture from some visiting dignitary ; was a train- 
ing school of all others adapted to the condition of the 
country. Of course, " we boys" were there, crowding the 
front seats, always wide awake when Squire Blake put on 
his glasses to hold forth in poetry or prose, or welcome the 
town's bright woman appearing in one of her sharp and 
breezy comments on home affairs in the lyceum paper. 

The circulation of the press was limited to two Boston 
weeklies, now represented by the "Advertiser" and " Jour- 
nal," the county weekly and " The Youth's Companion" in 
its early youth. At the age of from ten to fifteen my polit- 
ical training began by being perched on grandfather's post- 
office counter on Friday nights when the Boston mail came 
in, to read the speeches of Webster, Calhoun, Hayne, Ben- 
ton and Henry Clay, with the famous interview of Old 
Hickory, ending, " By the Eternal things shall go right." 

But all this, including the schools and the minister's 
sermons, was only an accumulation of material for the end- 
less talk that went on everywhere — between the mothers 
rocking the cradle, in the shoemaker's shop, at intermission 
on Sunday, and especially in the village store, where I 
studied human nature, stretched at length upon the counter, 
with my head resting upon a pile of cotton cloth, through 
a cloud of tobacco smoke listening to the great talk that 
raged up and down before the big fireplace until far into 
the winter night. Once, at a club, discussing the different 
means of human culture, Daniel Webster growled out : 



28 

*' Gentlemen, you have left out the most important univer- 
sity, conversation." American civilization, the World's 
Republic as we call it now, was talked into shape through 
250 years of what was going on in Warwick in my day. 

The one drawback in the schools was the half-barbaric 
discipline. Every master was " put to his trumps" to govern 
the group of big boys who gave their last winter before 21 
at school, often with the double purpose of learning a little 
more arithmetic and having their own way if they could. 
The good old way of thrashing, brought over from England, 
was in full blast. Now and then a master that couldn't 
keep on his feet was bodily put out of school or dismissed 
as incompetent. Then one of two pedagogic bullies, whose 
winters were spent in " keeping out" schools, was called to 
fill the breach. He generally began by taking some oppor- 
tunity to thrash every boy and girl with the regulation 
ferule ; in case of any resentment from the victim, handling 
him or her in a way that would bring a policeman to the 
rCvScue in any community in Massachusetts today. I was 
happily saved from this impending fate, in my first winter's 
school-keeping, of being put out of the school-house — as was 
threatened by five big boys, each more than a match for 
their sixteen-year old master, "small of his age" — by the 
advice of good Aunt Annie, before mentioned, sitting in 
one corner of the fire-place, in spectacles and matchless 
white apron, I, already " shaking in my shoes," in the 
other. She discoursed deep wisdom : "I know all them 
folks. I've nussed in every family in that deestrict. You've 
got five big boys there that say they're going to put 
you out doors. But I've come home tonight to tell you 
what to do. There are ten great gals in that school, and 
they're good gals, too. They say they are not going to 
have any such works as them boys want. Now you gain 
the affections of them ten gals and they'll take care of them 
five big boys, and your school will go just like sliden down 
hill." On that hint I acted. Four of my enemies were 



29 

captured ; the fifth by the help of the Lord, I thrashed, and, 
after a second thrashing from his father, he came back " an 
exemplary young man," It was no merit of mine. What 
couldn't any half-scared sixteen-year-old boy do, backed by 
ten great gals of Warwick ? That taught me the secret of 
all government in school, in family, in the State. Get the 
best ten gals or boys, men or women on your side — the Lord 
compromised on ten in the Sodom case — and then trust in 
Providence and be ready to fight when the brush comes. 

6. All that I have now said had its most decisive outcome 
in the political life of the town. We hear a good deal about 
the study of " Civics" in our higher schools and colleges, 
and there is no danger that American youth will know too 
well the history of their country, the organization of the 
government and especially the art of reading the political 
newspapers with profit. The ten most receptive years of 
my Warwick, residence, from twelve to twenty-two, were 
passed in a time of great political agitation ; the first de- 
monstration of "Nullification" by the South, with the great 
debates in Congress ; the administration of General Andrew 
Jackson and his successors, involving the decision of the 
important financial questions later on. The beginning of 
the anti-slavery and temperance agitation was dividing the 
voters. Happily, the long period of at least outward con- 
sent to w^orship God together in one church had practically 
banished religious intolerance. So the " spoiling for a fight" 
that is the chronic condition of an Anglo-Saxon community 
where, as in the New England of that day, the natural 
weapons were the only armory of exasperated manhood, 
showed itself in the town politics. And as the one hundred 
voters, more or less, of the place were divided almost equally 
between the two parties, whig and democrat, there was 
abundant opportunity for lively times on the approach of 
election day, especially as there were two or three of them 
every year. The love of litigation was also kept alive by- 
certain people who supplied the town with entertainment 



30 

by the frequent trials before the justice of the peace, in the 
tavern hall, liberally re-enforced by libations from the bar 
below. I have listened for days to the pleadings of young 
country lawyers, who afterwards reached the highest honors 
of their profession in different States, in trials involving the 
rights of the different dogs in a neighborhood and matters 
incredibly small, but all acting as a vent for the intense energy 
stored up as in a mighty receiver in one of those isolated 
townships. Governor N. P. Banks used to say : " One time 
you'd visit a Yankee town and find the people in constant 
friction over two or three ambitious leaders whose perpetual 
quarrels gave no peace to the community. Ten years later 
you'd go back and find a new factory village with two or 
three mills, each of these quarrelsome men a superintendent 
of one, and the town in perfect harmony." It was the vent, 
the opportunity to use the prodigious amount of ability 
stored up in these little republics, that finally set adrift the 
young men and women who became the makers of States, 
and, later, in the building up of manufactures and the growth 
of large villages to cities created the new grouping of society 
amid which we live today. 

7. It must not be inferred from this prodigious develop- 
ment of earnestness and the often stern, serious and reserved 
aspect of society, that a New England town seventy to sev- 
enty-five years ago was what might be inferred from the 
caricatures that often appear in the novels and romances 
that attempt to deal with this period. Of course, every 
town had its due proportion of cranks, melancholies, people 
who lived by themselves ; and in some of them every ap- 
pearance of undue gaiety was regarded by the church and 
clergy as the last development of Satan. But no people on 
earth has been more richly endowed with " mother wit" 
and an intense love of fun for its own sake than the New 
England people of that day. And the more it was sup- 
pressed outwardly, the more it pervaded all classes and 
showed itself, like the electric spark, wherever two fun- 



31 

loving souls furnished the positive and negative conditions. 
And as every great European court in the middle age had 
its professional jester, generally the brightest man of all, 
licensed to say everything that nobody else dared to breathe, 
so every New England town was furnished with one char- 
acter, a " Sam Lawson," or otherwise, whose pranks saved 
the people from despair on anything, even their own salva- 
tion. 

The man of all others who " kept things going" in War- 
wick, in my youth, under proper training, might have made 
another Artemus Ward or Mark Twain. As it was, his 
genius blazed out in a comical way he had of giving to 
every person in town a queer nick-name, which fitted so 
close that, once tried on, it was as easy to get along without 
your skin as to dodge it. He appropriated to himself the res- 
pectable name, " Mr. Chase", and honored his partner in life, 
as " Lady Washington." The goings on of this town wit were 
a constant entertainment to the community, and the sparkles 
of not bad-humored witticism that came from "Mr. Chase" 
became for several years a positive element in the schooling 
of the boys and girls. After his day came up from Boston 
town a man, with his admirable wife, so wise, kind and ap- 
preciative, with such a fund of delightful humor that would 
have made him a bosom friend of Charles Lamb, ready to 
turn everything that approached a dismal crisis on its com- 
ical side, without children, but the dear "uncle" of every 
boy or girl that needed help outside the home, that I 
verily believe his ministry of cheerfulness was for years 
the best of all the ministries in the town, already distracted 
by the attempt to " dispense the gospel" from four pulpits 
instead of one. 

The " conclusion of the whole matter" is that, during 
the hundred years between the incorporation of War- 
wick and the decade before the outbreak of the civil war, 
a New England town like Warwick — and there were many 
such — was a concentrated and isolated universitv for train- 



32 

ing half a dozen generations of as able, effective and trnly 
superior people as ever took a hand in the making of a na- 
tion. But, of course, this tremendous concentration and 
development of local ability had its shadow-side in an exag- 
gerated sense of personal " independence", an obstinate 
provincialism and the lack of appreciation of a cosmopolitan 
order of society, which sometimes put these New England 
States in political policy in opposition to the growth of the 
Republic. Within the past fifty years we have been pretty 
thoroughly disciplined out of our conceit of an exclusive 
Anglo-Saxon civilization, by the prodigious invasion from 
abroad in our own State and the spectacle of the magnifi- 
cent development of the commonwealths beyond the Berk- 
shire Hills that, from the first, adopted the policy of 
making "Native Americans" out of "all sorts and condi- 
tions" of people in the round world. 

The change from this old order began in my youth, with 
the establishment of a " factory village" in many of the 
hill towns around a " water power" in a valley, which soon 
outgrew the original town and in time became what everj'- 
where out of New England is called a city, with the later 
building up of great manufacturing centers with twice the 
sixty-two thousand people of the Boston of seventy years 
ago. It was inevitable that the New England town of that 
day finally was to become a city or flourishing village, or 
one of a group of suburban towns adjacent to such a center. 
The emphasis of life today in New England is on its urban 
side. The marvelous improvement in transportation has 
now practically placed every Massachusetts farmer within 
an hour's ride or ten minutes' communication with a flour- 
ishing village or city of from three to a hundred thousand 
people and made every considerable village practically one 
of the wards of the nearest city. 

Perhaps we shall better realize this startling fact by a 
glance at what has happened in and around our beloved 



33 
town, Warwick, since the day of which I am writing, from 

182 s to 1850. r t • -U 

Warwick was then one of nine towns, only four of which 
had a larger population than its 1,150, the group ranging 
from 488 to 1,889. This entire region of thirty miles square 
was a farming country, watered by two rivers and numerous 
brooks and ponds ; outside the meadow land and valleys a 
tumble of high hills with our Mt. Grace the summit, 1,600 
feet hi-h, and our " upper village" 1,000 feet above the sea. 
There were less than 10,000 people in the entire region, 
probably not 500 of foreign birth. I have described the 
opportunities of the youth in the church and school, includ- 
ing two academics, and given a general impression of the 
wa'y the people lived, with very little absolute poverty and 
a sprinkling of men who could boast the old-time estimate 
of wealth :" He's worth 140,000." , ,. . 

Several of these towns, including our own, have declined 
in population and importance with their share of "aban- 
doned farms" and apparently no immediate prospect of re- 
cuperation. But in 1900, there was in this thirty miles 
square a population of more than 25,000. Two litt e ham- 
lets of mv vouth are now flourishing villages of 7,000 
and 9,000 people, with practically all the advantages of city 
life furnishing three millions and four millions of the entire 
tax' valuation of the nine towns, eleven million, five hun- 
dred thousand dollars. It is easier today to reach either of 
these centers from Warwick village than to visit half the 
Warwick farmers of seventy years ago from the old meeting- 
house There is now a market for every man who can put 
his brains into his hands in furnishing supplies for what is 
possibly a population of thirty thousand people By the 
^reat change in church affairs-leaving out Northfield, now 
a National educational religious center-a score of these 
churches have become each a group of institutions, with 
arrangements for social, educational, charitable and mis- 
sionary enterprize never dreamed of before. Every one of 



34 

the 5,000 school children in these towns is now entitled to 
a free high-school education, superior to the old academy, 
and the public school property of the region is probably in 
the neighborhood of half a million dollars, without estimat- 
ing the Moody seminaries. There are fifty thousand volumes 
in the public libraries, and every family may be reached by 
a daily newspaper of the first class. In my grandfather 
Cobb's diary, I find a record of the battles of the wars of 
Napoleon, often months after their occurrence ; while today 
it is easier for any inhabitant of this village to know what 
was going on yesterday in the Japanese and Russian contest 
than in my youth to hear of the last boy drowned in the 
Connecticut River, in Northfield, or the man who had broken 
his leg in Orange. The method of trading in the dozen or 
more country stores in the old day " failed" all but a very 
few of the more enterprizing " store keepers" and left many 
people finally restless and uncertain, with little to look for- 
ward to after a life of half a century of toil. 

One of the resvilts of the rapid-transit system of travel is 
now a reversion to the good old British idea of every well- 
to-do family having a country or suburban home, away from 
the terrible rush and roar even of a manufacturing village 
of 5,000 people. I am not here to advise the farmers of 
Warwick what to do with their lands. But after an obser- 
vation of every part of our country east of the great conti- 
nental mountain range that overlooks the Pacific realm, I 
am here to say that I know of no six miles square that, with 
proper investment and good management, would furnish 
a greater number of sites for charming summer homes, 
with a more healthful climate and attractive scenery, both 
for city visitors and people from the crowded commu- 
nities in the valleys that are invited to " lift up their eyes 
unto the hills" of Warwick and find there the " strength" 
that comes from a quiet interval in the mad rush of the 
tremendous days in which we live. And if this picture of 
the twenty-five years in old Warwick which I have been 



35 

living over again during my week of preparation for this 
occasion and the prophecy of what may to our children 
present a new Warwick even more attractive of its sort than 
the old, shall set anybody in my hearing to thinking on the 
possibilities of the dear old home lot, I shall thank the 
good Providence that in promoting me to the Warwick 
aristocracy of eighty years has kept me alive once more to 
behold your faces and listen once more to the echo of be- 
loved old voices on this most glorious of old Warwick sum- 
mer days. 



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